Pie in the Sky

What I think I hear you saying is that this KBW thing is just a pie in the sky fantasy of yours. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but here I've been wracking my brain trying to help you accomplish it, and you don't really want to accomplish it, do you. The thing about a fantasy is, if you try to actually do it, whether you succeed or fail, it takes the fun out of it and you have to go looking for another fantasy with which to entertain yourself. So I won't bother you any more with my helpful hints, because I certainly don't want to spoil your fun.

I remember that story about Naked Noah. See the Hebrews had this hang up about nakedness, they thought it was disgraceful or something. I think the guy who found Noah naked was one of his sons, and all he did was run and tell his brother about it, thinking that they could both have a good laugh about it. The brother, however, had more respect for his father than that, so he backed up to Noah and dropped a blanket over him without actually seeing him naked, which was the proper thing to do. There may more to it, but that's all I remember.

You can tell a lot about people from the stories they tell. My hypothetical wife, who is better at finding things than I am, found the Epic of Gilgamesh for me today. After I confirmed the part about Utnapishtim, I leafed through the book and remembered some other things about it. This is supposed to be a religious text because it's all full of gods and heroes, but there is nothing in it about right and wrong or good and evil. This tells me that the concept of right and wrong that we have today was not developed among the people who told this story. Even in our own Bible, the Old Testament displays a way different concept of good and evil than the New Testament does. I remember, when I first started reading the O.T. as a child, that I thought it didn't seem like it was talking about the same God that I had learned about at Elsdon Methodist Church.

In a manner of speaking, it wasn't. I found out later that some of those O.T. stories were borrowed from the Mesopotamian culture from whence the Hebrews came. They consolidated all the Mesopotamian gods into the one God that we have today. Well, not exactly. The role of the mean gods was consolidated into the character of Satan, which is kind of strange because we are supposed to be monotheists. Then God and Satan each had their own angels, so the pretext of monotheism was actually pretty thin.

Okay, one example, and then I'll try to get off this Noah's Ark kick. In our Bible, God decided to flood the world because the people had become evildoers. In Gilgamesh, the god Enlil wanted to flood the world because the people had become too noisy and were disturbing his sleep. Apparently Enlil didn't have the power to do it himself because he persuaded all the other gods to help him. Only the god Ea, who had a soft spot in his heart for the human race, dissented from Enlil's plan, but he didn't have the courage or the power to directly oppose it. Instead, he went behind Enlil's back and warned Utnapishtim about the impending flood, suggesting that he build a really big boat to ride it out, and save the animals while he was at it. After the flood, Enlil was pissed to find out that some of the humans had survived, but the other gods felt remorse over their part in the deal and took Ea's side. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Enlil made Utnapishtim immortal as a reward for his work instead of punishing him like he wanted to. Now Enlil was about the highest god on Earth, second only to Anu, who mostly kept to himself in Heaven and didn't usually intervene in Earthly matters. Nevertheless, Enlil knew that he would have a hard time ruling the Earth if all his subordinate gods  refused to cooperate with him. The book didn't say this, but I think it sounds like the ancient Mesopotamians were pretty savvy about politics, even if they didn't know the difference between right and wrong. And so it has been with politicians even unto this day.

a story is just a story

I think I’ve explained that the best way to bring about KBW is not through elections, not from the top down, not by seizing power and imposing my agenda, but by creating the new man, or maybe I should say the new KBW man, because other agendas have their own new men.

So it’s a grassroots thing which I have been pursuing through casual conversations, mostly in bars, where people are more amenable, but also more prone to arguments, which as you know, I enjoy. Maybe I enjoy them more than promoting KBW, which is a problem, if I ever achieve the world dominance which I crave, who will I argue with? Maybe as the tide of KBW covers the world we will have to leave a few enclaves, like Beaglesonia, and maybe some of the northwest where they brew that good craft beer, to their barbarity so that I can drop in and have an argument when I am in the mood.

You’re right, I don’t want to be like onto them or even meet them halfway because I don’t want to abandon my current well-honed arguments and begin arguing about whether space aliens are from Mars or Venus, or if Libras are smarter than Virgos.

If we must speculate about stupid Noah and more specifically about flood stories. I think they are around because people have ever, just as now, suffered through floods, and the stories came down generation through generation, and since they didn’t have any written language I imagine the stories began to vary, and since a story teller likes to tell a good story, I imagine they soon started putting people in them, and pretty soon the story became more about the people than the flood which is what I think the case is with Noah. Speaking of which what is with that odd thing where he got drunk and passed out naked and a couple people put a cloak over him and he got pissed and made one of the guys be a servant to the other for the rest of his life?

Pretty weird shit, but you know, something people can sink their teeth into rather than, it rained and then it rained some more, and guess what it did the next day. And maybe the animals two by two because at one of the shows some drunk heckler kept yelling, “Hey what about the animals then why didn’t they all drown?” I guess when the other heckler started wanting to know what did they all eat, they just ignored him because hauling hay was not as interesting as the march of the animals. And think of how the toymaking industry of the day loved the animals two by two thing.

But it’s that people thing that hooks people. As I’ve illustrated people love to believe these strange and nonsensical stories without a shred of proof, and I have wondered why don’t they just go for science then which is full of plenty of odd things, and has proof to boot. But then science has no people in it, there is no story of the little electron that could, and in the big bang we do have the four energies separating out and atoms being formed and how about that inflation? But nobody pisses anybody off, nobody gets thrown out of a nice garden, no hot babes, a yawner.

I don’t think any stone agers ever figured out that their land had previously been underwater. In the nineteenth century when they came across those fossilized sea plants on the top of mountains, they were scratching their heads until they discovered that land is constantly rising and falling and moving around.

Science is all about figuring out what is going on. The pagans and animalists and shamans were just trying to explain what was going on the best they could. The problem is once they got their magic amulet trade going they never wanted to make any changes in it lest they have to devise new amulets. The way they failed science was in shutting the door on new knowledge.

I don’t know if stories extend any knowledge. I think they are just there to entertain. I think you can watch a Two Broke Girls marathon and come away without your knowledge extended at all. Then there are those moral stories, you know where the good get rewarded and the bad get punished. Mostly we tell them to children because they haven’t been around long enough to figure out that that is not the way the world works. I don’t think anybody becomes more moral by listening to those stories over and over.

I think the whole idea that you can sort of sugar-coat an idea by making it into a story which people will listen to whereas they would be bored by just hearing the fact, is false. People will just listen to the parts they want and ignore the rest. And the whole idea of sugar-coating is wrong. You can sugar-coat a lie as easily as the truth, whereas if you present just the facts why any believer in KBW can take it home and cook it up in his crucible and see what comes out.

Just Speculating

It's like I said before, there are more people in the world than just scientists, and you're never going to attain KBW without somehow getting them on your side. One way to get them on your side would be to convince them that you're right, another way would be to give up and become like unto them, and another way would be to meet them somewhere in the middle. You've already been trying for decades to convince them that you're right. How has that worked out for you? If you were to become like unto them, it would mean giving up most of your agenda. You might get elected, but then KBW would be so much like the current world that it would hardly seem to be worth the effort. That leaves meeting them in the middle. That might not work either, but it's all I can think of at the moment. Maybe, as we continue this discussion, something else will come up. You never know about things like that.

Like I also said, people have been telling stories since long before the scientific method was ever developed. That doesn't mean stories are any better than science, it just means that they were here first, and there's probably a reason for that. I don't know for a fact what that reason might be, but there's no harm in speculating about it. Let's continue with the theme of flood myths, since we're already there.

Like I said, there is geological evidence that Mesopotamia experienced a catastrophic flood of Biblical proportions, although it probably happened before people were living there. I'm not familiar with the geology of Mesopotamia, so let's go somewhere else, like the American South West. A lot of that country certainly looks like it was sculpted by water, although there is little water there now. As a matter of fact, modern geologists have determined that the whole region was under water at least once in the prehistoric past. Although primitive people were not geologists, they were probably more observant of their surroundings than the average person is today. They had to be, since their lifestyle required it. So here's this bunch of Stone Age hunter-gatherers walking around in the desert looking for something to eat and drink. They can't help but notice that it looks like there was a lot of water here once, but it's not here now. It would be natural for them to question where all that water came from, and where it went to. They next thing they would wonder about would be how all the animals that are here now managed to survive a flood of that magnitude. Sitting around the fire at night, somebody comes up with a theory, tosses it out to his buddies who kick it around for awhile, throwing out their own ideas as they occur to them and, before you know it, they have a full blown flood myth, complete with Noah and his ark. Well they probably didn't all call him "Noah", I believe the Mesopotamians called him "Utnapishtim", or something like that. (Can't readily find the book to confirm spelling and don't want to spend any more time looking.)

Isn't that what science is all about? First you observe something, then you wonder about it, then you try to explain it, then you test your theory to see if it works. Sometimes your theory cannot be readily tested with the tools available to you, so the theory will just have to do until somebody comes up with a better one. Sometimes old theories are not completely overthrown by new theories, they are just tweaked a little as new evidence comes to light. So it is with stories, except that people find stories to be entertaining, which tells us something about human nature. A long time ago, some shaman must have discovered that telling stories was a good way to get people's attention. Another way was doing magic tricks, which people also find entertaining. Maybe we're onto something here! To effectively persuade people, you can't just tell them what you want them to hear, and you can't just tell them what they want to hear, you have to entertain them in the process. Shall we toss that one around for awhile?

 

bigfoot and space aliens triumphant

I pretty much agree with everything you say about the biblical Noah’s ark, but I have to say my main reaction is so what? It just seems like a distraction from building KBW, and not a very interesting one at that.

For awhile there I watched Hunting for Bigfoot on the Animal Channel. It was funny. There were four of them. One was a woman who was the smartest of the bunch and skeptical at the beginning of the episode, but going along at the end. There was the requisite big dumb guy and some guy who appeared to be the leader who was always spouting this pseudo science gibberish and some other guy.

They would begin by driving into some backwoods place and then there would be a town meeting where four or five people would come forth and say they saw Bigfoot, and these guys would pick three or four of them and go to their various rural abodes and listen to their story and then they would kind of replay the scene and weigh the evidence and even the smart woman at the end would agree that it was probably bigfoot.

What was funny is here were these four guys, the supposedly best informed bigfoot guys in the world, and with all their equipment and lore they had never seen bigfoot. They had all these theories which they pronounced with scientific certainty about what bigfoot ate and hung out, and what he liked and didn’t like. Which was easy to do since there is no such thing so they could say whatever they wanted about him. It was hard to decide whether these guys actually believed or not, though in retrospect I would have to think that they were probably all actors. It was pretty funny, but after awhile it was the same thing over and over again and became pretty boring.

All those stations that started out like they wanted to be halfway intelligent, The Learning Channel, Discover, History, Science, they are full of that crap. I think it is one of those things where a poll shows that thirty percent of Americans believe some wacko theory, it is the same guys that are watching these shows.

And here’s a thing, they will say, well how can you say you don’t believe our latest wacko theory when you didn’t even see our show? They crank these things out maybe five a day and so you’d have to spend a big part of your day watching them and then you’d have to explain why they are bullshit to people who have no knowledge of history or science and wouldn’t know a logical method to analyze anything if it abducted them and probed them all weekend.

You know my heroes, those white lab-coated scientists in their tall towers, look askance at the howling mob with its space aliens, and astrologies, and bible inerrants, and crystals, and whatnot, and think what a fine work is man, what a magnificent mind he possesses, get a gander at all those neurons, and consider on the other hand these hopeless nuts. So every now and then some scientist wanders down into the Valley of Ignorance and takes on astrology or biblical inerrancy or whatever and asks them how can they be so ignorant and shakes them up and shows them the path, and they all end up throwing rocks at him as he hustles his butt back to the towers where the other scientists tsk their tongues at him and say, “Told ya so.”

In Search of Noah's Ark

I have read other accounts of people allegedly finding the ark from time to time. Apparently there is kind of a cult of believers that have been searching for it for a long time, some call them "arkaeologists". I'm not making this up! The Bible says that the ark came to rest on Mt. Ararat, but it doesn't say where Mt. Ararat is located. There is a Mt. Ararat in the modern country of Turkey, but some believe that mountain was just named after the Biblical one. Still, Turkey is not that far away from Mesopotamia, certainly not too far for the ark to have drifted there during the big flood. Most of the people who have claimed to have found the ark admit that all they found were some old timbers that could have come from anywhere, except that nobody lives around there, and there would have been no reason for anybody to lug those timbers way up the mountain. There has been at least one aerial photo taken of the alleged ark. It's nothing but a dark spot on the glacier, but its apparently rectangular shape suggests that it is a man made object. To my knowledge, nobody has ever found the ark twice, when they go back to the site, it seems to have vanished.

I was quoting the part about the floodgates from memory, but most of my readings of the Bible were the Revised Standard Version. I could look it up, but the wording is not that much different from what you found in the King James, so I'm going to count it "close enough". The point is that this was not just a normal rainstorm. I read someplace, I think it was Wiki, that there is geological evidence of a massive flood in Mesopotamia, probably cased by a tsunami that came roaring up the Persian Gulf, but it likely happened before people were living there. The Tigris-Euphrates river system has always been prone to periodic flooding, but nothing of Biblical proportions. Many ancient cultures have flood myths in their heritage, which some believe tends to confirm the Biblical account. About 10,000 years ago, when the earliest civilizations were beginning to form, glaciers were melting and sea levels were rising all over the world. It is unlikely that the whole world was ever totally under water at one time, but many settled areas have had at least one catastrophic flood in human memory, so the popularity of flood myths should not be surprising.

The Bible is not a scientific text book, it is a collection of stories, written by dozens of different people over several centuries. The Book of Genesis is mostly mythology, probably handed down by word of mouth for hundreds of years before any of it was written down. The Flood Myth likely originated in Mesopotamia, from whence the ancestors of the Hebrews probably came. The Mesopotamian version may be found in "The Epic of Gilgamesh", one of the most ancient texts known to modern man. The cast of characters is different, but the story line is close enough to have been the inspiration for the Biblical account. I have read "Gilgamesh" and still have the book in my possession. If you think the Bible is weird, try reading that one in your spare time.

The Canopy of Water Theory is not found in the Bible, it is the attempt of some people to make sense out of a few Biblical references that are inconsistent with what we know today. The theory itself is quite logical, and I think it's a good example of how an argument can be logical and still wrong. Well, I don't know for an absolute fact that it's wrong, so let's just call it bloody unlikely.

the good book

KBW is just Ken’s Better World, the place where everybody has a crucible in their living room and spend their evenings subjecting all their beliefs to the gem-like flame of reason, and thus walk tall in the world and all the women are strong and all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.

I think it’s safe to say that whatever you saw about Noah’s Ark was not on PBS. Kind of peculiar that these people had found pieces of the ark but later couldn’t remember exactly where they found them, and you have to wonder what they would have found, some hunk of old wood, and how would they know where it came from?

Well, you did it Beagles, you sent me scurrying through my bookcases for my Elsdon Methodist bible, and according to mine, which is the esteemed St James Version, all the fountains of the great deep were broken up and the windows of heaven were opened, not a word about floodgates. Who knew heaven had windows. Well I guess maybe you could say those fountains of the deep were the waters below, comparing the windows of heaven to some canopy sounds a bit shaky, and then you have to wonder if God meant to say canopies, why didn’t He just say canopies?

Here’s the thing about the bible, it is made up of all these books that were lying around and some were added and some were discarded, and then there were various versions of all these books so only certain versions were incorporated. And those books in turn were written in several different languages so those all had to be translated into English by mere mortal men, ah but the fundamentalist says, God guided their every step so that the resultant book is His word. Then why are there so many different versions of the bible, did He guide certain translators one way and certain translators another way. And even among people who swear by the inerrancy of the bible, they have all kinds of disagreements with each other, so what the fuck?

I wouldn’t call the bible logical in the sense that math, oh and science, and maybe law are. It is full of inconsistencies and contradictions and paradoxes, and people study it all their lives and still don’t agree on what it means.

Actually I think that is what you are saying in your last paragraph. You have this clever method of starting out to say something, but as you expound you make these subtle shifts so that by the end you are saying something else and the unwary reader, like me, who is already formulating his arguments against your original premise, doesn’t notice the shift and prepares his argument but when he rereads what you’ve said, it turns out you were saying something else.

I wonder if that is a dig at me, people who think the bible is bullshit, but have never read the bible. Let me just say that it’s a long Goddamn book, and it’s not like an argument, like a scientific theory, say evolution. The theory of evolution is pretty short, you could probably encompass the whole thing along with corroborating evidence in less than fifty pages, and it is all this therefore that therefore this other thing. The bible is just this happened and then that happened, and there are just a bunch of barely connected stories and there is no clue that this paragraph in Exodus 39:8 is more important than Isaiah 10:11.

And not that any of that means much to me anyway because, as you know, I dismiss the bible out of hand.

KBW? - I Don't Noah Bout Dat

You have mentioned "KBW" at least twice now, and it just occurred to me that I don't know what it means. Were you waiting for me to ask, or have you already told me and I forgot?

I just remembered that we had an experience with some pollsters once. It was the Nielsen people, the ones who make up the ratings for the TV shows. First we got something in the mail, decided that we weren't interested, and threw it away. Then we got a phone call, they wanted to ask us a few questions to determine if we were eligible to participate. My hypothetical wife told them that we weren't going to participate, so there was no point in us answering their questions. The Nielsen lady didn't seem to understand what the word "no" meant, because she just kept going on with her spiel until my hypothetical wife hung up on her. Then we got something else in the mail, it was this TV log that we were supposed to keep for a week and send it in when we were done. Enclosed were five brand new one dollar bills which, I suppose were intended to make us feel obligated or something. We kept they money and threw the papers away, which is what my hypothetical wife told them the next time they called. They didn't contact us any more after that.

The reason that I remember all this stuff, but don't remember where and when I read or heard it, is because I didn't know there was going to be a test on it some day, so I never wrote any of it down. This is just stuff that I found interesting at the time, I wasn't planning to argue about it on the internet. Now, when you say something that reminds me of it, I try to dredge it up as best I can. I suppose I could check it our on Wiki, but that would take time away from our discussions. Anyway, like I said, I don't necessarily believe all of it, I just think it might add something to the discussion, so I throw it out for whatever it's worth.

Like that Noah's Ark movie I told you about. The TV Guide said that it was about somebody who had allegedly found the remains of the actual ark up on Mt. Ararat in Turkey, which is where the Bible says that it grounded as the flood waters receded. I wanted to see exactly what it was they had found, and why they thought it must be the remains of Noah's Ark. It turned out that there had been several different eyewitness accounts of finding the ark over the years, each in a slightly different location, and that none of the finders were able to find it again when they came back later with other people. The show said that this was because the wreckage was encased in glacial ice, which moves a little each year, and that drifting snow may have periodically covered and uncovered it. Wait, it gets better!

The Bible says that, in the beginning, God separated the waters upon the Earth, the waters beneath the Earth, and the waters above the Earth from each other. To the casual reader, this might be interpreted as referring to surface water, underground water that can be tapped with wells, and atmospheric water vapor, or clouds. To the fundamentalist, however, if the Bible says that there were waters above the Earth, it means liquid water, not water vapor. If the Bible had meant water vapor, it would have said water vapor. This led some people to formulate the Canopy of Water Theory. See, there was this canopy of liquid water that was somehow suspended above the Earth, and it was the collapse of this canopy that caused the Great Flood. In referring to this flood, the Bible says that "the floodgates of Heaven opened". A lot of guys would think this was just a poetic way of saying that it rained a lot but, to the fundamentalist, it means that there were literal floodgates in Heaven, which opened up and dumped the Canopy of Water upon the Earth. The Bible also says that "the wellsprings of the deep burst forth". According to the movie, this means the weight of all that Heavenly water hitting the Earth at once pushed down so hard on the land that it caused the underground water table to come gushing up to the surface. All this water sloshing around caused massive mud flows that imprisoned prehistoric plants and animals, which is where all those fossils came from. Those species would have all became extinct anyway, because the Canopy of Water had a greenhouse effect on the climate and, now that it was gone, there was this global cooling that the dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures could never have tolerated.

I know that you think this is all bull shit, and I agree, but it's logical bull shit. If you believe that every word of the Bible is literally true, then this whole spiel makes perfect sense. It has to, otherwise one might be drawn to the conclusion that every word in the Bible is not literally true, and we certainly can't have that. Many sincerely religious people believe that the Bible is a collection of history, mythology, poetry, and creative story telling. While they believe in the general principles that the Bible teaches, they are pretty sure that God did not create the world in six days, and that the world is much more than six thousand years old. Then again, there are people who believe that the Bible is just bull shit. Of course they haven't actually read it, they don't have to because they just know it's bull shit, not unlike the people who have never read anything about the Theory of Evolution and just know that it's bull shit.

P.S. Added 4/27/14: Okay, I get it, KBW stands for Ken's Better World. Right? Also, in case I didn't make myself clear, the point of the Noah's Ark story was that people can rationalize almost anything if they set their minds to it.

the KBW is coming

I gave myself some wiggle room on how many scientists don’t believe in evolution by saying it’s hard to define who a scientist is. I guess I would mean academics, and to a lesser extent people who work in research. People who are looking to discover things we didn’t know before, not people who are using stuff we already know to build better bridges and computers, no engineers.

There is this thing where in order to keep your scientific cred you have to publish papers in these academic magazines, and then other scientists read the papers and decide if they are true or make sense, and your standing in the community kind of depends on this. This is the self-policing function of science. If your experiment proves something that most scientists don’t believe, you will have a hard time of it, but you will get your day in court. Every now and then some group says they have discovered how to do cold fusion, and they get a bit of a buzz over that, mostly from the lame stream media because scientists are skeptics. One of the things you have to include in your paper is how you got the results you say you did. If you say you invented cold fusion you know plenty of scientists are going to run the same experiment the same way and see if they get the same results. So far none of these follow ups on cold fusion have been able to replicate the results of the guy who claimed it.

Anyway I’ll give you that if you define scientists broadly enough you can get to somewhere where ten percent of them do not believe in evolution.

I wonder about this Noah documentary. There are some stations like the history and science channels that used to actually, and sometimes still do, show historical and scientific shows, but they never got a big audience for them and now they specialize in space aliens. I think I dismiss this documentary and its ‘professors’ out of hand.

I’ll go out on a limb a bit here because I have no stats, but I believe the vast majority of those who don’t believe in evolution are religious fundamentalists. It’s not that they disagree logically with the facts and the chain of reasoning that underpins the theory of evolution, I doubt that they have ever even investigated any of them, because they don’t have to, they already believe in something else, the inerrancy of the bible.

Why should they bother listening to a bunch of pointy headed guys with pockets full of pens when they have God right there telling them the truth? There’s no reasoning with these guys. You can show them fossils and rock strata and gene charts and it won’t mean a thing. I expect that they don’t believe that the earth goes around the sun either so I don’t guess they would be much in the line of rocket scientists either. I suppose they could do well at some technical problem, they might be engineers, but they could never be anybody that discovered any new facts because for them any fact outside the bible is suspect.

I have to admit that I didn’t believe you when you said there were Seventh Day Adventist colleges, so I looked it up, and there they were, but I never heard of any of them and my guess would be that they are like Jim Jones University and that college that Jimmy Swaggart set up.

I do have a general idea how they select people for polls. They try to adjust for demographics like if the general population is ten percent Jewish they need ten percent Jews in their sample, and so on, and you have to be careful about things like you can’t do a random phone poll because people who have phones are a little different than people who don’t, so if you just used people with phones your sample would be unrepresentative of the public at large, and if you are doing an opinion poll you have to be very careful about how you word the question. Politicians and interest groups and companies do polls all the time but they have axes to grind and I think you can safely dismiss them out of hand.

There are a number of independent polling firms, and they have reputations to protect, and also they are all competing with each other so if one polling place made up numbers they would be wrong more often than the other pollsters and would soon be out of business. I picked the Pew poll because it was the first one on the screen that I googled. I’m sure other polls would show similar numbers.

But you are right, I am taking it on faith. For all I know space aliens have taken over Pew Research and are now cranking out phony numbers as part of their plot to take over the earth. Still I estimate that chances of this are slim, and I will accept their results before I accept some poll Jake, my beer drinking buddy, tells me that he heard about someplace, sometime.

I dismissed your Noah show out of hand. But if you could come back and say something like it aired on PBS 4/12/10 and gave me the name of the producer, why I would have to admit it right back in hand. Because I know PBS and I think they are reputable, and if I have any doubts I can look up the show and check it out.

See this whole thing where some people believe something and others believe the other thing and neither one can prove their case, then you are free to choose which one you want like you are in a cafeteria line and choosing between the jello and the cupcake, is just wrong, wrong, wrong. And worse than that, diametrically opposed to KBW.

We seem to be having some problem getting this running the world thing in order so it may be sometime before KBW agents invade Beaglesonia and arrest you for wrong thinking and take you to reeducation camp and make you sit in front of that crucible, but we will get around to it.

I just made up that nickel a burger number, just to give an example, and I thought it sounded a little poetic.

The Numbers Game

You're probably right that I didn't need to quote any numbers at all to demonstrate the point I was trying to make, which was: If you want to rule the world, you are going to need more people than just scientists on your side. You also may be right that I didn't remember the numbers correctly. After all, a certain amount of memory loss is to be expected at our age. (I read that somewhere, but I don't remember where.) I remember doubting those numbers when I first read them, but then I got to thinking that it depends on how you spin them. They didn't say that 90% of Americans don't believe in evolution, they said that 90% of the general public, meaning those people who are not part of the scientific community, don't believe in evolution. Now to verify that, we first need to know what percentage of the U.S. population is included in the scientific community. That might be hard to ascertain because, as you have said, not everybody who calls themselves a scientist is really a scientist. I remember once that you said sociology is not a real science, but then later you allowed that maybe it was. Unless we have an accurate and objective way to count all the scientists, we can't either prove or disprove the assertion conclusively.

I find the part about 10% of the scientific community not supporting evolution easier to believe than you do, only because I saw a documentary on TV once about Noah's Ark. This thing started out pretty rational, but then it went off on some tangents that were patently absurd. There were lots of scientists contributing to this movie, if you count anybody with the title of "Professor" who works for a university as being a scientist. Some time later, I was discussing this with a friend of mine who was married to a Seventh Day Adventist. He told me that lots of Seventh Day Adventists are scientists, but they have their own universities because they don't believe in evolution, or anything else that contradicts their literal interpretation of Biblical history. I know what you're thinking right now, but please bear with me for a little while longer, I'm going somewhere with this. I used to go to a medical doctor who was a Seventh Day Adventist, and it didn't hurt his medical practice at all. Well, he was kind of preachy about my smoking and drinking, but most doctors are nowadays. Also, he wouldn't prescribe birth control pills to an unmarried lady, unless she was engaged to be married within the next couple of months but, other than that, he was just a regular doctor. The point being that you could be a scientist and still not believe everything that every other scientist believed. A rocket scientist, for instance, might not believe in evolution, but that wouldn't interfere with his work. In addition to the Seventh Day Adventists, there are a few other religious denominations that don't believe in evolution. I know that some scientists are atheists, but I'm sure that many of them aren't. The 10% of non-believers in evolution might easily be made up of scientists who have religious or philosophical reservations about that one subject, but who are otherwise in agreement with the majority of the scientific community.

Go ahead and dismiss this argument out of hand if you want to but, if you do, I reserve the right to dismiss those Pew people out of hand. I remember discussing those pollsters with you once, and you admitted that you didn't know how they contacted the people they polled. How do we know that they don't just make those numbers up? Okay, they probably don't, but we don't know that for an absolute fact, we accept it on faith. That's right faith, Brother!

Speaking of numbers, where did you get that extra nickel we were going to have to pay for our Big Macs if the minimum wage were to be raised? I didn't dispute it because I assumed it to be an allegorical number, like when the Bible says that it rained for forty days and forty nights. Truth be known, we both were a little presumptuous about that. An increase in the minimum wage wouldn't necessarily cause a rise in prices, the employers might find some way to cut the other costs of production to make up the difference. They even might shave a little off their profit margin if they wanted to stay competitive with their competitors. I said they might, I didn't say that they would.

I didn't say that the government was any more corrupt than private corporations, I said that it might be less efficient. The government is better than the private sector at some things, like police and fire protection, but that doesn't mean we should let them co opt the entire domain of private enterprise. That's been tried before, Comrade!

The thing about the bailouts is that we'll never know what would have happened if they hadn't happened. They said we'd have economic troubles if they didn't do it, so they did it, and we had economic troubles anyway. How do we know if there would have been more troubles or less troubles if they hadn't done it? A lot of things in life are like that.

KBW, just the facts, Man.

You never read in the National Geographic that only ten percent of Americans believe in evolution, because that was never true at any time in your lifetime, and I don’t think the National Geographic would print something so obviously false on the face of it. I don’t believe that Pew Research is going to take a poll and then lie about it. I dismiss that idea out of hand.

I note that you said you read that ‘some time ago,’ which is a little hard to place, to me that phrase would mean at least five, maybe ten years ago. You know, at my age I am not so much worried about the things that happened that I don’t remember, as I am about the things that I remember that never happened. Anything I remember as having heard ten or more years ago, and not since, I generally need to double check that information.

And you are absolutely right, it didn’t have much bearing on your argument, you could have said many Americans don’t believe in evolution and your argument would have been just as valid. I do that all the time when I have only a vague memory of a number and don’t want to wade into the internet.

I have probably told the story before but maybe five years ago I got into an argument with this guy about immigration. There are two sides to this and you know which side I was on and we were going at it in a brisk manner, and then he said that crime was soaring on the US side of the border, which I have read often was not the case. Crime is soaring on the Mexican side of the border but the drug guys keep it there because they don’t want no trouble with us.

Well here is the thing, he could have argued that immigration is overall a burden on the US economy. I don’t agree with that, but there are arguments to be made on either side. But the crime rate on the US side of the border is a verifiable fact, just check the police reports. The whole gentlemanly tenor of the argument changed for the worst. Maybe I should get an iphone after all and google it for my argument and show the guy, but you know he probably would have said I was having a problem with my batteries or something.

See facts are the basis, the axioms of my scientific Betterworldism, this is how science works, you start with the facts and you build from there, but if you have an untrue fact in there somewhere my whole bold edifice collapses. If you say the Russians are by nature nasty people we can argue about that. If you say Death Valley is in the middle of Russia, I have a problem.

That thing about us running the world is just a joke, just a levity thing I throw in when I feel myself getting a little too heated. Not everybody would be happy with KBW (Ken’s Better World). Probably logically it makes no sense for those CEOs to be getting those science fiction salaries so that would be a thing of the past which would not make them happy. I guess the ideal would be the altruistic one of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, which is pretty vague, and there are holes in it.

What I meant by money never existing was in the sense of GE stocks plummeting, and the shareholders wondering where their money went, and the answer is it didn’t go anywhere, it only existed in the first place in the minds of people who at one time thought the company was worth a lot of money and then later decided that it wasn’t. Likewise the US dollar which was once a solid coin and then became a piece of paper, and now is just numbers in the cloud. If everybody woke up next morning and decided that it wasn’t worth anything, it wouldn’t be.

Not that I am going to be emptying my wallet over the balcony, I can still buy myself a pale ale and an Italian Beef. Maybe the value of the dollar is like classic physics where everything makes common sense, and what you call the new physics where once you get close to the speed of light everything goes to hell.

I don’t quite follow your explanation of how that extra nickel per burger goes to a corporation rather than the government (too many variables which may or may not come into play). But I like your statement about how those guys who advertise low prices pay their employees so little that we taxpayers have to subsidize their food purchases and health insurance. And this is something we have to pay whether we take advantage of those low prices or not.

I was speaking of corporations being corrupt. Whether they get bailed out by the government or not, they are still corrupt. But there is a problem separating corps from gov, in that the corps run a lot of the gov.

I don’t know about those bailouts. On the one hand a lot of crooks went scot free, but on the other hand if we had let the bankers and GM go down the tubes, would that have had a catastrophic event on related corps and sent our whole economy into the dustbin? If that’s true it’s probably best we did it, if not, we probably shouldn’t have. But how can we know? I don’t know. 

I didn't say that I believed it

I just said that I read it in National Geographic. The reason I didn't check it out on Wiki was that I don't care about it that much. Anyway, how do you know that Wiki knows any more about it than National Geographic? They are both reputable sources, although Wiki is a secondary source. The primary source in this case is that Pew guy, but how do we know that he's telling the truth? National Geographic has been around for more than a hundred years, long before people started taking all those polls. They do screw up once in a while, but then they always print a retraction after somebody calls their attention to it. So why don't you write them a letter calling their attention to this alleged error? Be that as it may, I still think you would have a tough time ruling the world with just science and logic. Come to think of it, I could be wrong about that. Since it's never been tried before, I can't say for certain that it wouldn't work. Go for it!

You said something awhile back about wanting to rule the world with me, and I declined the honor. Okay, maybe you just meant you wanted us to save the world. I could go along with that because we could just do it once and be done with it, we wouldn't have to spend the rest of our lives going to all those boring meetings. The thing is, though, how do we know that the world even wants to be saved? It's hard enough saving somebody who wants to be saved, much less somebody who doesn't. Maybe somebody should take a poll about that.

I think that to say "the money never existed" is a bit of a stretch. The Federal Reserve Board creates new money by buying up government debt from private dealers and assigning credit to the dealer's bank when they cash the check. The bank is allowed to loan out nine times that amount, which creates even  more money. When the Fed wants to cool down the economy, they take money out of circulation by selling some of the bonds that they previously bought. When the Great Depression started, the Fed was supposed to put more money into circulation, but they reduced the money supply instead. I don't know what they were thinking at the time, but these were educated men who should have known better, which leads me to believe that they did it on purpose. And you wonder why a guy gets paranoid?

When I pay a nickel more for that burger, the money doesn't go directly to the guy who cooked it. The money goes to the corporation that employs him, say McDonald's. They use that nickel to make up for the government mandated raise that they just gave to their cooks, and McDonald's profit margin remains the same. Now, if that raise had never been  mandated, the underpaid cooks would have still been eligible for government assistance like Medicaid and food stamps. If the government assistance had never been there, many of those cooks could not have afforded to work at McDonalds in the first place. If they had to drive any distance at all and maintain a reliable vehicle, or if they had to pay somebody to watch their kids, or if they were already on some kind of government assistance for which working would make them ineligible, they might actually lose money going to work for minimum wage. If McDonalds could not find enough qualified people who were willing and able to work for them, they would have to pay their help more or find some other way to get their burgers cooked. In a manner of speaking, then, the government assistance that goes to people working full time for minimum wage is as much a subsidy for the employers as it is for the employees.

I don't think that government is any more corrupt than private corporations, although they may be less efficient. The big corporations that do become inefficient usually end up getting bailed out by the government, so they don't count. The advantage of dealing with a corporation is that you have more options than dealing with the government. You can take your business elsewhere or even decide not to buy the product at all. Okay, you can't do without some things like beer and cigarettes, but you can make your own or reduce your consumption.  I didn't say it would be easy, I just said it was possible.

Betterworldism, saving the world one crackpot at a time

90 percent of scientists believing in evolution doesn’t sound right. 99 point nine something sounds more like it. But there is some wiggle room there, I imagine if you describe scientists very loosely you might be able to get a number like 90. But 90 percent of Americans not believing in evolution, that has to be sheer balderdash, I doubt if that has been true since the days of the Scopes Trial. So to the google and the answer on the first page is a pew research poll which puts the number who believe in evolution at 33 percent. This is a far cry from ninety. And here is my complaint Beagles, why did I have to go to the wiki, why didn’t you do it? Why is it always me that has to do this work? You are as retired as I am.

How did I get to running for prez? I guess to implement my better world through boiling down all the bullshit in the crucible of clear reason and then abiding by the logical truth that emerges. What, you think that’s too long for a bumper sticker?

Well one of the things the commies wanted to do was to create the new man who would be altruistic and loyal to the party that advocated to each according to his need, from each according to his abilities. One imagines had they done this we would all be hanging portraits of Uncle Joe in our living rooms, except not really because Uncle Joe was hardly an exemplar of the new man. Unlike Uncle Ken who as far back as the day when the famous Beaglesonian Institute consisted only of him and this crackpot guy, always followed the ideals of that slogan that was too long for a bumper sticker.

Actually, if everybody followed the tenets of betterworldism, it wouldn’t matter who was running the show since it would all be based on reason and logical debates would settle everything. And Uncle Ken would not require his portrait in the living room, though a copy of The Wit and Wisdom of Uncle Ken on the coffee table would be a nice touch.

I like stories as much as the next guy, but I think making up a story to illustrate a principle is probably not the best way to get a point across. I suppose it’s ok for kids in the single digits, but then you are probably more interested in getting them off your back then teaching them anything.

I think if you don’t know anything, the best thing to do is not to follow your gut, the best thing to do is learn something, and then melt it down in the crucible etc.

I don’t know where money comes and goes. Remember when a depression hits, and people look around and see that we have the same wheat fields and the same factories and the same people, and they ask what happened to all that money we used to have, the hard truth is that that money never really existed, and in fact money itself, if you get right down to it is voodoo.

I don’t see how by voting for a minimum wage you are giving your money to a corporation rather than the government. Maybe you are saying that you will have to pay a nickel more for a burger, but it seems to me that that nickel goes into the pocket of the employee who is neither the government nor the corporation.

And I don’t get all you guys who think somehow it is better to have the corporations running things than the government. If the prez voted himself a salary of 50 million he would get voted out of office. Try voting out the CEO of a corporation. There are plenty of government scandals and thefts, but they pale compared to corporate scandals and thefts.

Vote the fry cook an extra dollar and two an hour, even if the world goes to hell, which I think we both agree is going to happen anyway, at least that little girl gets an extra cookie every day until that happens.

The Human Factor

Some time ago, I read in National Geographic that about 90% of the scientific community accepts the Theory of Evolution and about 10% of it doesn't. I don't remember if it was the global scientific community or just the American one, but that's not the point. The point is that, among the general population, those numbers are reversed. Now, if you want to rule the world, you're going to have to find some effective way of dealing with that other 90%. I'm sure you don't want to rule by force of arms but, even if you did, you would still need more than 10% of the general public on your side. If you want to get elected fair and square, you're going to need more than 50% on your side. Unless you know something about it that I don't, you're not going to win over a majority of the electorate by logic alone. Logical argument is a good place to start but, unless you mix it with a little bull shit, the public won't buy it. It's like that old song: "A little bit of sugar makes the medicine go down...." They had to say "sugar" because, in those days, you couldn't say "bull shit" on television, but you get my drift.

People have been telling stories since way before the advent of modern science, and there's probably a reason for that. You know how little kids are always asking dumb questions like "Why is the sky blue?" Well, I think that early man developed story telling skills so that he could answer questions like that. It may not be the correct answer, but it's the best one you can  come up with at the moment, and it will likely satisfy the little bastard for awhile so that you can go back to sharpening your spear. As a former teacher, you must know that even precise stuff like mathematics goes down a little easier if you can frame it with an interesting story, especially with the younger students.

Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against science or logic, but it's not the only way you can understand the world you live in. Sometimes you don't have enough information to make an intelligent choice, so you've got to go with your gut, or don't go at all. When I bring something off the wall into our conversations, it's usually because I want to make a contribution, and that's all I've got at the moment. I don't expect my comment to be the last word on the issue, just something of interest that might lead us into something else, which keeps the conversation going. If the conversation doesn't keep going, it brings us to a dead end, and we ain't going nowhere from there.

Okay, back to minimum wage for awhile: Of course the idea of raising the minimum wage, or any wage for that matter, is to put more food on the table, but you still have to figure out where the money's coming from. There's an old saying, "The government cannot give you anything without first taking it away from someone else." When you think about it, all money comes from other people, not that it's a bad thing, it's just one of those things. Well, the money actually originates with the government, but the money is just a medium of exchange that represents true wealth. The only way to acquire true wealth, like potatoes or crude oil, is to either produce it yourself or get it from somebody else. That stuff doesn't fall from the sky, you know.

Anyway, at this point, I am inclined to vote for the minimum wage increase. Since I'm going to be paying for it either way, I'd rather make my payments to a corporation than to the government. Not that corporations are any more virtuous than the government, it's just that it's more efficient to cut out the middle man. If the government handles it, some of the money is going to get siphoned off along the way. Well, I guess that happens with corporations too, but I don't think it happens as much. It's like I've always said about health care: We don't need both the government and the insurance companies taking their cut before the money even gets to the doctors. One or the other, but not both. Anyway, that's where I'm at right now, but I could change my mind before election time if I come across new information or an opinion that makes more sense to me than mine.

the better world express

That stuff about making a better world, I’m joking, but not really I guess. I really do believe that if we got together and debated our beliefs logically and were open to accepting whatever beliefs were the most logical, the world would be a better place. We would see more clearly and be better able to steer the ship of state, or in the case of a one-worlder such as myself, the planet, so we would steer it better, and in general everybody would be happier.

I would have to say that there is roughly zero chances of this happening, but the closer we get to this ideal the better off we will be.

Mostly I take my context from science where you can say something like the mass of an electron is 9.1 x 10^-31 kilograms. And if somebody doesn’t believe that you can go right back to those English gentlemen scientists through the guys of today with their weird wonderful gadgets and present all the papers and if one were smart enough one could go through them all and examine every assumption and conclusion and if one could find some mistake, then we would have to re-weigh the electron, but if one couldn’t one would have to accept it.

Of course the world of people is a lot more complicated than the world of subatomic particles, but I still think if we applied the same rules to them we could make some progress, we could throw out some theories that are false on their faces and we would be better off never having to debate them again. So I guess I do have an agenda.

The thing about this agenda is you really have to get your facts straight because these are the building blocks that you build your theory from. This is why I get upset with these anecdotal stories from dubious or nonexistent sources, they muddy the clear water of reason. When you are mobilizing your atom smasher to find the top quark you can’t stop your process every time some guy walks in and says some guy told him that he read somewhere that the mass of an electron is really 9.2 x 10^-31, and discuss it with him. Maybe sometimes there are two opinions and the truth is somewhere near the middle, but mostly the truth lies squarely on one side. If an outlandish theory has a reasonable source I am inclined to listen to it, but if it is just something I heard from my beer drinking buddy, much as I like my beer drinking buddy, I am inclined to dismiss it out of hand, after all there is a better world to be built.

Here’s another thing about the minimum wage. Both sides talk about it in terms of whether or not it will help the economy. But what about the fact that the kid of the guy who gets an extra buck or two an hour, will get an extra cookie with her milk? Doesn’t that count for something?

That's Heavy, Man!

I'm not sure how to respond to all that stuff you said about making a better world, I'll have to think about it for awhile. Meanwhile, I think we should keep going because, if we wait till we can solve that one, we won't get anything else done.

Of course all opinions are not equally valid, but that doesn't mean they are mutually exclusive either. Sometimes the truth is somewhere in the middle, and the only way you're going to find the middle is to bounce back and forth between the extremes until gravity or something takes over and settles you where you need to be. I usually don't go onto our discussions with an agenda, I just toss something out and see where it lands. Maybe some things won't ever land, but we'll never know if we don't toss them around a bit.

When we first started working, minimum wage wasn't that big a deal, it was just a starting point for youngsters working their first job. Then, when you got some experience under your belt, you could start looking around for something better. If there were no opportunities for advancement with your current employer, you just found yourself another employer. I don't think it's like that nowadays. With the de-industrialization of America, a lot of people are working at low paying service jobs, and there's more people looking for work than there is work. Wages in general have not kept pace with inflation since about the 1970s, and the average family needs two people working to make the  money that one person used to make.

Another feature of the post industrial age is that we have an economy based on consumption rather than production. According to several news reports I have heard, consumer spending accounts for about 70% of all the economic activity in the country. Now I never asked for this situation, but it's here now, and we have to deal with it somehow. If you're going to base your economy on consumer spending, it seems that you've got to find some way to get money into the hands of the consumers. You can either raise their wages, or you can give them supplementary assistance like food stamps and Medicaid. I don't buy the assertion that raising wages causes employers to hire less people, they just raise the price of their product to make up the difference. If they raise prices too high, then people  buy less stuff, and we're right back where we started from. Supplementary assistance comes out of our pocket too, either as increased taxes or inflation. The more money we lose to taxes and inflation, the less money we have to buy stuff and, again, we're right back where we started from.

It was some time in the 1980s that I first heard about this post industrial movement. I told them at the time that it wouldn't work, but they didn't listen to me. They never do.

making a better world or flapping our gums

Maybe that is a problem. I have not been thinking of this like school, but I have rather been seeing it as a formal debate, well maybe not formal, but as a debate. You know it’s my dream that reasonable people of varying beliefs will come together and lay out their beliefs and melt them in the crucible of logic and see which one best passes the test, and then they will all adopt the truest of the beliefs and shake their hands and walk away to convince their fellows in like manner, and they will all hold only the truest beliefs and we will all be able to walk forward shoulder to shoulder to, oh I don’t know, build a better world I guess.

That’s not too much to ask is it? Well of course it is, I don’t expect anything like that to happen, but I think it is something that we should aim for, I thought that was one of the goals of the Beaglesonian Institute.

But not so, says Beagles, it is a conversation. A conversation? Oh I don’t know, I have conversations all the time, they’re okay, some are better than others, but to devote an hour of my time every day to a conversation, oh I think this, and you think that, how about that? I have to tell you I’m not so interested in that. If I’m not boiling that stuff in the crucible to make a better world well, I might as well be watching tv.

Well I know I’m too argumentative and too much of a know it all. I have toned down the know it all, sometimes when I am bloviating I have enough sense to make myself stop, but the argumentative thing is kind of who I am. If I didn’t do it I wouldn’t be me, and who wants to go through life being somebody else? Let others be somebody else, since they already are anyway.

But I can’t accept that because there is a difference of opinion on some matter that you can just choose which side pleases you the most. There is a difference of opinion on most all things, to pretend that this means all opinions are equally true is balderdash, balderdash I tell you.

I never find anything that is probably not true very interesting. I read a couple liberal sites and sometimes what they say is pure balderdash and I dismiss it out of hand. I do not write it up in this blog because well, it is an opinion, and all opinions are equal, so let’s see what Beagles has to say about it. I don’t want to waste Beagles hunting, fishing, and tuning time. I just wish he would dismiss things out of hand more often.

Raising the minimum wage is something the conservatives are against, ostensibly because it is messing with the sacred infallible hand of the marketplace, but mostly because their media is dominated by fatcats who want to pay their workers as little as possible. Liberals are for it because they have warm hearts and feel for the downtrodden, and think that if a guy is working a regular job he should be able to pay his rent and feed his family. The downside is that some people will lose their jobs and maybe you will have to pay an extra nickel for that burger. The upside is the guy will be paying his rent and feeding his family and won’t be on section eight or food stamps and can probably afford health insurance.

The Russians didn’t want to kill all of the people and take the lands of their conquered, they wanted to kill some of them and steal some stuff, and make the people suffer under godless communism, which was not nice, but still better than being killed. The Czech Republic has emerged from under the Russkies worse for wear, but under Hitler there would have been nothing to emerge.

You know the Romans were doing well enough way back when, but the other Italians around them were giving them a hard time, so they had to conquer them, and then they ran up against the Etruscans, who they had to conquer, and so it went. Everytime they conquered an irritating neighbor they found themselves right on the border with another irritating neighbor. You right wingers remind me of that, you are always looking for the next enemy. Without a main enemy you would curl up and die.

I guess you could say the Romans did build up that magnificent empire, up until they finally reached too far. I think in reality the whole family of nations is well, partly friends and partly enemies as out inclinations take us, so we always have enemies, but the idea that there is always one country or group of countries that is public enemy number one just doesn’t seem logical.

This Is Not School

This is not school, nor is it a formal debate, this is conversation. If both of us were to limit our contributions to things that we could prove mathematically or scientifically, we would soon run out of things to talk about. Most of our scientific knowledge is derivative anyway. We did not do the experiments or the research ourselves, we rely on the work of others. When one of them others says one thing, and another one of them others says something different, we are free to believe either one of them others, or none of them. Nobody is paying us to do this, and there will be no report cards issued at the end of the semester. Just because I tell you about something I read, saw on TV,  or overheard in the supermarket check out line doesn't mean that I expect you to swallow it whole, or that I even believe it myself. It's more like: "Have you heard about...?" or "What do you make of that?" I don't get around much anymore but, as near as I can remember, that's how people normally talk to each other in real life, so why can't we do it on the internet?

I don't know about you, but I like to talk about this stuff because I find it interesting. I'm only mildly interested in some things, and thus unwilling to spend a lot of effort on them. Sometimes our discussion leads me to become more interested in something, and then I try to find more information about it, but I can't do that with everything. If I did, I wouldn't get anything else done, and I still wouldn't know everything there is to know about everything. I try to keep an open mind about most things, but sometimes some action, like voting, is required, and then I have to make up my mind one way or the other. 

Okay, here's one like that: One of the proposals on the Michigan ballot this fall is about raising the state minimum wage, and I'm not sure what I think about that. I have heard arguments both for and against that seem reasonable to me, and I haven't yet made up my mind how I'm going to vote on the issue. Would you care to throw in your two cent's worth? I can't guarantee that your argument will sway me one way or the other, but I promise to give it a fair hearing.

You're right that the Germans wanted to kill us all and take our land but, by the end of World War II, they had given up on that idea. Then it was the Russians who wanted to kill us all and take our land. I don't think they currently harbor that ambition, but you can never tell about those sneaky Russians, so we'd better keep our eye on them just in case. Now the biggest threat seems to be the Islamic terrorists. I'm not sure if they want our land, but they do seem to want to force us to bow down to their heathen god. Of course that's not going to happen, but they can still do a lot of damage in the attempt. Then there's the Red Chinese. Nobody knows what they want because they are inscrutable but, whatever it is, they won't need to resort to violence to get it, they can just buy it with the money we gave them.

Meanwhile, life goes on in Beaglesonia. The snow is melting, the creeks are rising, and it looks like I'm going to be cutting firewood all summer. That is, if we even have a summer this year.

No more wacko theories

Just because some people believe in a story doesn’t mean very much. I believe there is still a flat earth society. The coal and oil fat cats have no problem finding some guys with good academic credentials to say global warming is a myth.

In life Son, you will run across many occasions where one group of people is saying one thing and another group is saying another thing. The proper thing to do is find out why each side believes what they do, weigh the evidence, and come to a logical conclusion. The improper thing is to pick a side because it goes along with most of the stuff you believe already, or maybe because you like one group better than the other, or maybe just because what the hell.

It’s a lot of work weighing the evidence on both sides, especially if it’s a subject you don’t know much about in the first place, and there are deer to be hunted and fish to be fished and tunes to invent, so sometimes we look for a short cut. An easy and obvious one is which side most people believe. It’s a tricky one though because it’s wrong a lot. I generally look for some kind of academic standing, not just for the person giving the opinion, but where he stands among others of academic standing, maybe review why he believes what he does, ah blah, blah, blah.

We’ve been here before, but we’re not going there again. The next time you drag in some wacko theory that you read somewhere sometime but you can’t remember who the author was or whatever, I am just going to say bullshit and move on.

I am going to the Ten Cat tonight, and maybe I will be talking to Jake and the subject of libertarians will come up and he will say that they are all pederasts, and I will ask him where he got that and he will say he read it in a magazine once, and there is some website on the internet. But I won’t be writing on my next post that I hear you guys are all pederasts, and when asked for evidence, say well some people think so, and their theory has never been disproven.

If you had been awake in science class way back in Gage Park High, you would know that because a theory has never been disproven doesn’t mean shit. It has never been disproven that ghosts roam freely or that the Martians regularly probe us in a personal manner or that the Germans are the master race, and I freely dismiss these things out of hand, and if you don’t like it you can lump it.

That phrase is a bit out of place, but it’s been in my mind and I wanted to use it. Lump it? Who lumps things? And why does whether you like it or not have a bearing on if you lump it?

Just trying to lighten things up, because this whole wacko thing is getting on my nerves. When we are in a disagreement I generally take some time and some key strokes to make my case, which is a bit of work, and then you just say well I heard it somewhere, and if you took five minutes out of hunting and fishing and tuning, and examined it in the clear light of reason you would see that it doesn’t make any sense.

I think I’ve already spent most of my time on this so I will just say briefly that there is no scientific definition of race and people seem to use it however they want to so it has no generally agreed on definition, so it’s best to avoid it if you want to make any kind of logical case.

Everybody comes from someplace else, and also everybody came from someplace else before they were in that place they came from, and so on and so on.

The thing about things like occupying Germany and going to war is that there are a lot of people involved in it and they all have different reasons for doing it. If the Russkies were not on the other side we would never have gone there. If it happened to be say, the French, our allies, who were threatening to dominate the Krauts, we might have expressed our disapproval, but I doubt if we would have come to the aid of the freedom loving Germans, who, remember again, had only recently threatened to kill all of us and take our land.

I Got It To Work

"A modern theory, that the core of Ashkenazi Jewry emerged from a hypothetical Khazarian Jewish diaspora, is now viewed with scepticism by most scholars^[who?], but occasionally supported by others. This Khazarian hypothesis is sometimes associated with antisemitism and anti-Zionism."

I got the copy and paste feature to work tonight. Apparently I was doing something wrong yesterday. Anyway, that's pretty much what I said about it, it's a theory that is not universally accepted by historians, but some people do believe in it. I'm surprised that it has been used to support anti- Semitism because I think the author of the book I read was Jewish himself. He said that his theory tended to refute anti-Semitism because it asserted that most of the Jews in Europe weren't really Semites. Although the Khazarian Jew theory has never been proven, which is why they call it a theory, it has also never been disproven, so I think it's kind of premature to dismiss it out of hand.

The Wiki article says that the Khazars were a racially and culturally mixed people, based on archaeological studies of the region. It particularly referred to some skulls that had been dug up as being definitely Mongoloid. This seems to support my assertion that there really are noticeable differences between the races other than skin color, and thus tends to refute the current politically correct theory that there is scientifically no such a thing as race.

I looked it up once, and there are about seven million Jews in Israel today, and at least twice that many in the United States, plus I don't know how many all over the rest of the world. I find it hard to believe that all those Jews originated from a little country the size of New Jersey. Then  again, it's also hard to believe that all the Czechs in the U.S. came from tiny little Bohemia. When Mary and Joseph traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem, it was because of a decree that went out from Cesar Augustus that everybody had to return to the place of their birth so that they could be counted in a census. That's why there was no room at the inn, and Jesus had to born in a stable. I wonder what would happen today if everybody had to go back to where they came from. Would there be room for them all? Then again, if all those home towns became over crowded, what would happen to the places that people left to go back there? Would they be de-populated, or would they be just as full of returnees? I mean, everybody comes from someplace and goes to someplace, and we still have more people everywhere than we used to. It kind of boggles the mind, doesn't it.

I still think your assertion that the U.S. presence in Europe had nothing to do with defending people is unreasonable. Of course we were trying to stop the spread of Communism, but it was not an "either-or" proposition. The way we were trying to stop the spread of Communism was by defending the people who were threatened by it. The two things go together.

Realpolitik again

I’ve read it. It seems like you have taken a few liberties but nothing wrong with that. Actually on rereading it I see at the end where the Irishman tricked you, which I hadn’t picked up on the first time. Always a hard thing with a joke, it’s so much funnier if you just allude to it, but then sometimes people don’t get it. But if you are too obvious about it, it can lose a lot of its humor. It’s why we writers try so hard to get critiques, but most of our friends just tell us it was very good. It’s a problem.

That story about P and W, it sounds like a million other stories that went around in a million other schools and since its only source is the rumor mill, I think we can dismiss it out of hand.

What was your mission in Germany, to aid the freedom loving Germans or to stop the red tide? That takes us back to Realpolitik, being what is good for the US and fuck everybody else, and Wilsonianism which is that our goal is to make it a better world for everybody in it. We have had this discussion before and we shall have it again. What I think it really is at heart is that the former is why our leaders take us to war and the latter is the reason they tell us why they are taking us to war. Not always that simple, but I think that is the general thrust of world events.

Consider that these freedom loving Germans were the guys who a little more than twenty years before we had been fighting to the death, and our biggest ally was the Russkies. Consider that while the Russkies were not kind to the occupied countries, bleeding them of their resources and making them adopt an awkward economic systems, the plans of our freedom loving Germans for these countries was to kill all the people and take their land.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have done it. It seems to have worked out pretty well so far. Of course fifty years from now when the Krauts have shed their guilt, they may begin to start thinking again about why is the master race constrained by all these puny lazy non-Germans.

Here are the Khazars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars . I had a hard time finding them because I kept running into Kazakhstan who you would think would be the same people, but it turns out they are not.

Interpretive history? You know what a better word for interpretive history is? Bullshit.

The two main kind of Jews are the ones who left Israel for Europe and other places and then came back and the ones who stayed in the middle east and Israel all along. They are different culturally, but are the same people.

I don't think you've read it.

Judging from your comments, I don't think you have read my story about the Royal Inniskilling Fusileers. I tried to copy and paste it from my files to here, but I couldn't make it work. Maybe Blogger doesn't allow that, or maybe it just doesn't like my browser. Ever since Microsoft updated me to IE 10, Blogger has been kind of glitchy about it. I have tried using Google Chrome before, but all I got was pop-up adds, despite my pop-up blocker being enabled. After I finish here, I'll try to send the story to you as an email attachment. We've had good luck with that before.

At the beginning of our senior year at Gage Park, rumor had it that "P" and "W" had started doing it for real over the previous summer. At the beginning of football training, "P's" coach said that he noticed he wasn't playing as well as he had the previous season. "P" said that he had noticed that too, but he wasn't sure how to fix it. The coach than asked him if he had recently become sexually active, because that would tend to take the edge off his game. He told "P" that he would have to decide what was more important to him, football or sex, and "P" chose football. Okay, that was all from the rumor mill, the only thing I know for sure is, after being joined at the hip for three years, "P" and "W" were no longer together. By the time I found out about it, "W" had already hooked up with another guy from a different school. Not that I would have had a snowball's chance in hell, but I certainly would have put in a bid anyway.

My mission in Berlin was to defend West Berlin in the event of a Russian attack. We were told that we could only hope to hold out for about eight hours, but we could take comfort in the knowledge that our deaths would be avenged by the rest of the U.S. troops stationed all over Europe. Actually, it wasn't as grim as all that. Our Government was counting on the Russians being smart enough to appreciate the consequences, so they wouldn't start no shit in the first place. Basically, we were there to establish a U.S. presence in West Berlin, which was supposed to keep the Russians from walking in and claiming it without opposition. It must have worked, because they never did. We were also there to assist the West German forces in the event of a riot or civil disturbance, but that never happened either. I think you're just playing with words when you say we were there to stop the spread of Communism rather than to defend our allies. The two things went together, and we couldn't have done one without doing the other.

I couldn't remember how to spell those Khazars, and I couldn't find anything close in my dictionary. The book I read was interpretive history. It was history, not fiction, but the author admitted that most other scholars didn't share his interpretation of the events. I also remember reading something else that said there are two kinds of Jews in Israel, the ones descended from the original Israelites, and the ones that came from elsewhere, mostly Europe. Another time I read or saw on TV that there were a bunch of Ethiopians, black as the ace of spades, who claimed to be Jewish descendants of Solomon and Sheba, which would have entitled them to immigrate to Israel. The Israeli authorities laughed at first, but then somebody did some DNA testing and declared that those guys were indeed of Israeli descent. The moral of the story is, you never know what's going to come out of your woodpile when you shake it up.

our freedom loving allies

I’ve heard the story of the limeys vs the taters. Those Irish, they just live to hate the British. They backed the Germans in both world wars because they were fighting the English. Though lately that all seems to have simmered down a bit. I always wondered if there ever came a time when two groups of people who hated each other ever got to the point where they tolerated each other, and maybe this will be a case.

P wasn’t really a fighter. I think he was just establishing an order in that seventh grade class. I remember there was a vacant lot at 58th and Kedzie where we used to go play baseball after school. It was all rocky and bumpy, but then every place we played was rocky and bumpy. My skills were quite limited but I always wanted to play. But I was embarrassed when we got to high school and in gym class we picked up sides and I was almost always picked last, and was kind of apologetic to the team that got stuck with me.

I don’t remember that he dumped W to pick up the pigskin. Seems crazy to me even now. I suspect she was not overly generous with her favors, but still just to walk beside her beauty that would have been plenty.

You weren’t in Germany to protect anybody. You were there to prevent the spread of communism. If our brave freedom-loving allies lived or died was of little concern to us, as long as the red tide did not touch our pristine shores. We were even less concerned with our freedom-loving Korean allies, and later the freedom-loving South Vietnamese. I think the Czechs, Poles, etc were better off living under a totalitarian regime than having the American and Russian armies fighting back and forth over their lands.

Of course we won’t do anything for the Ukes. Obama has made some weenie steps and the republicans will urge even more weenie steps, none of which are going to keep the Russkies from holding onto their long-desired, only, warm water port right on their Goddamn border for Chrissake. And the whole thing is complicated. There are probably as many people living in Ukraine that love Russia as there are that hate it. It’s their fight, not ours.

That Khazars are still a bit of a mystery as to who they were and where they went, but their choice of Judaism was, as you said, political, and probably didn’t get down to the man in the street. The European Jews are the descendants of the Israelis, not the Khazars.

That term white has kind of an odd history in the US. I don’t believe the Irish were included in the whites originally. And certainly the Italians and us weren’t considered quite white either. I am reading a book about immigration right now and it is interesting how attitudes about it have changed.

"Don't Start No Shit, and There Won't Be None"

There was this Black guy that I knew in the army who used to say that a lot. It was meant as a joke, kind of like, "Back off, mothah!", but all in jest. He was really a very peaceful guy, not like those Irish-Americans who used to mix it up with the Limeys down at Steffanie's bar. Have you read my story about that? If not, I'll post it here tomorrow. Steffanie's was one of those fighting bars, but only on a Saturday night. Any other night of the week it was just a friendly neighborhood bar.

I remember those friendly fights in elementary school. I never started one, but I never backed down from one either. Well, except for the first time, when I didn't know how to deal with it. When we got to Gage Park, they told us that anybody caught fighting would be suspended, no matter who started it, which kind of took the fun out of it. I think I've told you before how I ended up dealing with that. I remember "P", but didn't know that he was a fighter. I think I told you before how disgusted I was when he broke up with "W" because he wanted to save all his strength for football.

When I think about it, that was a dumb thing to say about U.S. troops never defending White people. Truth be known, that's exactly what I was sent to Germany to do, me and about a million other guys that were stationed in Europe during the Cold War era. I guess I'm still pissed off that our government never did anything to help the Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, and East Germans when they were trying to liberate themselves from Russia, yet they were eager to go to Korea and Vietnam to liberate Asian people who didn't even want to be liberated. This Ukraine thing brought it all back to me. I could be wrong, but I will be surprised if they do anything to help the Ukrainians, other than make speeches and fool around with economic sanctions, which they will drop as soon as it starts to disrupt the global economy.

When most people talk about race, they mean Black, White, and Asian, but the older definition means subgroups within those three categories, like the Celtic, Slavic, and Nordic people. Semites are a true race by that older definition, and they fall into the Caucasian, or White, racial group. The Arabs, Egyptians, and all the other Mid East people are also Semites, except for the Persians, or Iranians, who originated in Kazakhstan. Also from Kazakhstan, or somewhere around there, came many of the Eastern European Jews. History and legend get kind of mixed together here, but there was a Pagan tribe or race that was caught between the Nordic Christians and the Turkic Muslims to their south. Both sides were putting pressure on them to convert to their religion, but they weaseled out of it by becoming Jews. Later, their country was over run by somebody, and many of the refugees ended up in Eastern Europe. I read this in a borrowed book a long time ago, but I don't remember the title or the author, and the guy I borrowed it from has since died. This might make a good weekend research project, I'm sure that Wiki must have something about it. The people in question were called Kazars, or something like that.

The term "white" doesn't always mean a race, or at least it didn't used to. I remember from the novel "The Virginian" by Owen Wister where this one guy says, "I've got a French name, but I'm white." and this other guy responds, "I'll say you're white!" I think this was meant as a compliment, something like "You're okay in my book!". I have heard people in real life say, "That's mighty white of you." to mean "That was a good thing you did." Also in real life, I have heard the Arabs called "Sand Niggers". Of course you and I would never use a derogatory term like that, but I have heard other people use it. Anyway you look at it, this racial stuff is not all black and white.

I don't want to rule the world, but I wouldn't mind being a consultant to the guy who does. Consultants get to tell people what to do and, if it doesn't work out so well, they can usually evade the consequences.